| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 外國語文學研究所 === 106 === This thesis examines the wishes and longings in John Keats’s narrative poems that are informed by their socio-historical situation, and argues that Keats’s literary aspirations belong to the second-generation British Romantics’ attempt to resuscitate energies that fuelled progressive politics in a period when the high hopes of revolution were dashed by post-Napoleonic despair. Keats’s mythological poetry is grasped concretely as a literary endeavor in the face of socio-historical adversity. And this thesis calls Keats’s process of writing mythological narratives his “mythopoesis.” Such a creative process reveals the subtle ways in which an imagination of the otherworldly in fact embodies a struggling, civilizing spirit. This thesis suggests a parallel with the myth of Prometheus.
Chapter One investigates Endymion. While Keats concedes that this mythological romance suffers from inexperience and naivety, this vulnerability of the poem suggests a scarcely concealed utopian impulse, most notably at work in the fragile temporality of the eponymous hero’s quest. Endymion’s desperate embrace of his goddess, along with the unconvincing final resolution of the poem, gives rise to the feeling that Endymion cannot escape from the present; here, one finds an echo of Keats’s sensitivity to human suffering. Only through this tragic conception of life in time can a truly utopian hope be projected. In Chapter Two, this concern is further explored in Hyperion, where the melancholy of the gods expresses the poet’s misgivings about the liberal ideology of progress. Doubt leaves the epic attempt fragmented, and Keats goes on to compose The Fall of Hyperion, in which the visionary speaker’s fall into a melancholy awareness of mortality reveals a deepening of Keats’s utopian fantasy about a collective history. Chapter Three discusses Lamia, a sensational drama about a serpent-woman’s love affair that demonstrates a remarkable degree of libidinal and linguistic energy, which characterizes what Keats refers to as allegory in his letters. The serpentine movement of this romance demarcates the limitations of circumstances, in order to to gesture a potential way out of the historical impasse.
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